A CONVERSATION WITH A COLLEAGUE LAUNCHED THIS BOOK. She said that, a couple weeks into the semester, a student in her introductory psychology class had asked, “Why are we learning about biology? I signed up for a psychology course.”

This, we realized, was a very good question.

The student understood the biology. But he couldn’t relate the biological facts— about brain cells, biochemicals, neural pathways, genetic mechanisms, and so forth— to psychological ones. How could he? He had hardly learned any psychology yet.

Introductory psychology does not have to be like this. Students do not have to study genetic mechanisms before understanding the psychological qualities that people may inherit. They don’t have to memorize brain structures before learning about the psychological phenomena that researchers try to understand more deeply by studying the brain. Most important, they do not have to wait until their book’s closing chapters to encounter the topic of greatest interest to them: the experiences of people, living in a social world—a world of families, friends, relationships, ethnic groups, socioeconomic settings, and cultural practices. Fully functioning, socially embedded people need not be cordoned off into the closing chapters of an introductory psychology textbook. They could appear, front-and-center, in every chapter. Their appearance, we quickly realized, would open the door to a novel pedagogical strategy—one capable of solving numerous practical problems faced by introductory psychology instructors and their students.

Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain was written to execute this strategy, and thereby to improve students’ learning experiences in introductory psychology. The strategy itself is relatively simple; it consists of two steps.

The first step is a levels-of-analysis approach. As others have noted (e.g., Harré, 2002, Mischel, 2009), psychological scientists today work at different levels of analysis that complement one another. Much of the field is organized by three analytical levels:

Programs of theory and research conducted at person, mind, and brain levels of analysis are not “competing perspectives.” They are mutually complementary routes to scientific understanding. In combination, they make today’s psychology a multifaceted yet integrated science.

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A levels-of-analysis framework has two big advantages. In addition to being accurate (as a reflection of today’s field), it also is intuitive. Even before taking an introductory psychology course, people (1) discuss the psychological lives of persons, (2) are familiar with the capabilities of the mind (remembering, learning, etc.), and (3) know that the biological brain is what enables them to have a mind and to be a person. Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain capitalizes on people’s intuitive knowledge when presenting scientific theory and research.

With three levels of analysis, one has to decide where to start—the conceptual level at which to introduce topics. Many books start “at the bottom.” Writers cover the anatomy and physiology of neurons before discussing the thought and feelings of persons, or detail neural pathways from the eye to the brain before describing the range of perceptual information that people acquire as they interact with the environment.

Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain consistently starts “at the top.” We introduce a person-first approach to introductory psychology. Individual chapters first present phenomena at a person level of analysis: scientific theory and research focused on the lives of persons in sociocultural contexts. Subsequent material deepens readers’ understanding by exploring those phenomena more deeply, at the levels of mind (cognitive and affective processes) and brain (neural and biochemical systems). Each chapter—even the early ones, such as the chapters on the brain and nervous system, sensation and perception, and memory—executes the person-first mission.

This two-part strategy is designed to solve practical pedagogical problems. The problems were evident to us when we first discussed the student who wondered why he was “learning about biology.” They became even more evident, and more pressing, across the years during which Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain was developed. In focus groups, surveys, and chapter reviews, scores of instructors throughout North America repeatedly cited the following five vexing challenges. If you’re a seasoned intro psych instructor, they will be familiar to you. If you’re a student about to embark on the introductory course, rest assured that these are the challenges we have worked to overcome!

(1) Enhancing Student Engagement. Students look forward to introductory psychology; it sounds like one of the most interesting courses in the curriculum. But they often come away disappointed. They hope to learn about human experiences but instead find themselves slogging through technical topics they cannot directly relate to questions about people. Many thus become less engaged.

I was one of them. When I took the course in college, I learned relatively little about what I had thought was the field’s main target of investigation: people. It wasn’t just that the research subjects frequently were pigeons, rats, or dogs. The larger problem was that, even when humans came into view, they were so dissected into parts—brain structures; information-processing boxes; isolated attitudes, motives, and traits—that it was difficult to glimpse the whole. The psychology of whole persons seemed like an afterthought. I, too, became less engaged.

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Our person-first strategy overcomes this problem. Its unique format lets readers see, from the outset, how theories and findings throughout psychology bear on inherently intriguing questions about people. The person-first strategy is executed from the start—literally from Chapter 1, page 1, which discusses social stereotypes and their effects on students’ academic performance.

Greater student engagement, in turn, enhances learning. “Interest,” one researcher explains, “motivates learning about something new and complex…. New knowledge, in turn, enables more things to be interesting” (Silvia, 2008, p. 59). A person-first pedagogical strategy can boost both interest and achievement.

(2) Maximizing Student Comprehension. Comprehension is highest when readers possess an intellectual framework into which they can “place” new material (Kintsch, 1994). In traditional introductory psychology textbooks, students lack this intellectual framework when encountering some of the field’s most technical content. The course instructor knows, for example, how neurotransmitter functioning bears on emotional experience and how neural interconnections enable conscious experience. The instructor thus can easily place biological facts into a psychological framework. But the student usually cannot. This may impede comprehension and recall of the biological facts.

Comprehension could be enhanced if introductory textbooks revisited the “lower-level” details after presenting “higher-level” findings about psychological experience and social behavior. But, in practice, this occurs infrequently; most information about the brain is confined to an early chapter of the book. As a result, students not only may be baffled by biological material at the outset of the course, but they also may never come to see how research on neural, biochemical, and genetic mechanisms deepens the understanding of psychological experience.

Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain addresses this problem directly. Our person-first approach consistently foregrounds questions about human experience and social behavior. In chapters with substantial biological content (e.g., Chapter 3: The Brain and the Nervous System; Chapter 4: Nature, Nurture, and Their Interaction; and Chapter 5: Sensation and Perception), we begin by discussing research on the experiences of people living in a social world. This coverage provides readers with a readily comprehensible framework that facilitates their learning of subsequent material on biological mechanisms. In chapters that focus on mental processes, personal experience, or social behavior, relevant brain research is placed near the chapter’s conclusion. Again, readers possess an intellectual framework that enhances their comprehension of the biologically grounded research.

(3) Coverage That Is Integrated. A third benefit of our person-first approach involves a particularly challenging goal: conveying an integrated view of psychological science as a whole. In disciplines outside of psychology, introductory courses commonly achieve this goal; I still recall how intro courses I took in college explained a field’s “big picture”—its main intellectual challenges and strategies of investigation. Unfortunately, introductory psychology was an exception. There, I couldn’t tell if there was a “big picture.” Some psychologists did research with animals, others with people, and some did no research at all. In one chapter, I learned that social influences cause behavior. In another, it was elements of the mind. Elsewhere, genes, neurons, or biochemicals were the cause. No overarching conceptual framework connected the various theories and findings. Psychology seemed like a hodge-podge.

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I now understand that psychology is not, in reality, a hodge-podge. Today’s field is highly integrated; advances in different branches of the field commonly complement one another. The challenge is to show this to readers.

Our levels-of-analysis strategy meets this challenge. By covering a given phenomenon at each of three analytical levels, we show how diverse scientific findings converge and, in total, provide an integrated understanding of human behavior. Visual features (detailed below) complement the text by enabling readers to see, at a glance, the integrated nature of psychological science.

(4) Critical Thinking. We all want our students to think critically—not merely to absorb facts, but to acquire skills that make them critical consumers of scientific information. How can one foster critical thinking from the very outset of an introductory psychology course?

A person-first strategy promotes this goal—especially in comparison to alternative strategies. Students struggle to think critically about brain anatomy and biochemistry; when they encounter such material, they have few intuitions and are challenged merely to comprehend the basic facts. By comparison, however, students have strong intuitions about persons. By starting all chapters at a person level of analysis, Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain enables instructors to engage their students in critical thinking about psychological science from the very start.

(5) Coverage That Is Up-to-Date. Finally, the person-first format facilitates coverage of psychological science that is fully up-to-date. To see this, consider a major development in the contemporary field. Back in the twentieth century, some suggested that progress in brain science would eliminate the need for psychology; neuroscientific explanations might replace psychological ones (see McCauley, 1986). Today, however, many recognize that psychological findings guide brain research. As Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel explains, “You can’t understand the brain unless you understand psychology.... You can’t do meaningful biology, particularly of the human mind, without having a good psychological background” (Kandel, 2013). Multiple subfields illustrate Kandel’s point. For example, to identify brain systems underlying memory, one must first identify, at a psychological level of analysis, the different forms of memory that exist. To identify biological bases of depression, one must distinguish among psychologically distinct types of depression.

Today’s hybrid fields—cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, affective neuroscience, cultural neuroscience—show how psychological findings guide brain research. In these fields, researchers revisit, at a brain level of analysis, phenomena that were first established at person and mind levels. An optimal way to teach students about these research programs is to mimic the scientific field itself: First present the psychological findings, and then revisit them through the lens of brain research. This is the essence of our person-first strategy.

Another up-to-date aspect of Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain is our coverage of psychological disorders. In contemporary clinical science, investigators develop focused therapies that target particular disorders; “the overwhelming majority of randomized clinical trials in psychotherapy compare the efficacy of specific treatments for specific disorders” (Norcross & Wampold, 2011, p. 127). In the professional field, the study of therapies and the analysis of disorders thus are closely linked. However, in most introductory psychology textbooks, they are separated; books commonly review disorders and therapies in separate chapters. This separation may have been appropriate decades ago, but it is not optimal for representing the discipline today. In our coverage of psychological disorders in Chapters 15 and 16, we integrate coverage of disorders and their treatment. This enables readers to see how contemporary psychologists devise and evaluate treatments that target specific types of psychological distress.

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In sum, thanks to our person-first approach, educational goals that once conflicted become complementary. Should a textbook be maximally comprehensible to students or maximally up-to-date scientifically? It can be both; the pedagogical strategy that enhances comprehension dovetails with the scientific strategy that guides today’s research. Should a book aim to integrate the science or to engage student interest? Again, it can do both. By organizing coverage around levels of analysis, one can simultaneously integrate psychological science and engage students in questions about people—the inherently interesting questions that motivated them to enroll in our course in the first place.

The primary means through which Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain executes its pedagogical strategy is through its novel organization of material within chapters.

Our levels-of-analysis approach shapes the organization of individual chapters in two ways.

Let’s preview a few chapters to see how the strategy is executed:

The opening two chapters of Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain also advance the book’s unique pedagogical strategy. In Chapter 1, students see how a socially relevant problem (gender stereotypes and math performance) can be addressed at complementary person, mind, and brain levels of analysis. Chapter 2, Research Methods, covers techniques used to study the social behavior of people, the workings of the mind, and the neural and biochemical mechanisms of the brain.

Finally, opening vignettes are one more organizational feature that promotes the person-first mission. Unlike those of some texts, our chapter-opening vignettes are not designed merely to capture readers’ attention. They serve a deeper pedagogical purpose: to introduce the chapters’ main substantive themes. For example, a theme of Chapter 3, The Brain and the Nervous System, is that the brain must be understood as a network whose distinct parts are massively interconnected. The opening vignette, the story of a patient with Capgras syndrome, introduces this theme by portraying the psychological costs incurred when one of the network’s connections is broken. A theme of Chapter 4, Nature, Nurture, and Their Interaction, is that biological mechanisms and environmental experience interact—so much so that even people with the same genetic makeup can differ significantly. The opening vignette introduces this theme through a story of identical triplets, one of whom differs markedly from his siblings in personality and sexual orientation. In all cases, the opening stories introduce a chapter’s theme at a person level through stories of individuals or groups. The opening content is revisited within the chapter, where students see how scientific findings resolve puzzles presented in the vignette.

Chapter 1’s opening vignette introduces the theme of the book. It shows students how a compelling social phenomenon, stereotype threat, can be understood at person, mind, and brain levels of analysis. As promised, students do not have to wait to encounter the lives of people living in the social world.

A second means of promoting a person-first approach to introductory psychology involves the organization of the book as a whole.

The chapters of Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain are arranged into four parts. After Introduction (Chapters 1 and 2), they correspond to our three levels of analysis: Brain (Chapters 3–5), Mind (Chapters 6–11), and Person (Chapters 12–16). Chapters in each part review subfields of psychology whose primary research focus is at the given level of analysis.

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The parts are modular; after the completion of Chapters 1 and 2, they can be read in any order. Modularity provides flexibility—which, we find, many instructors want.

A key to the book’s modularity is found in Chapter 2, Research Methods. The chapter introduces not only research designs but also methods of data collection, including methods used in cognitive science and in brain research. This coverage provides readers with background sufficient to understand phenomena and research findings presented in all later chapters of the book.

Two features visually reinforce our levels-of-analysis approach. Both show readers how theory and research conducted at different levels of analysis—person, mind, brain (PMB)—interconnect. The features are called PMB in Action and PMB Connections.

PMB in Action integrates material found within each chapter of the text. This full-page feature shows how a question central to the given chapter can be understood at each of our three levels of analysis. PMB in Action synthesizes material that readers have encountered at earlier points in the chapter; earlier ideas and illustrations are brought together in one place, allowing the reader to see how research on the mind and brain deepens one’s understanding of questions about people.

PMB Connections integrates material between chapters. Readers see how a topic addressed at a given level of analysis in one chapter is also addressed, at different levels of analysis, in other chapters. For example, in our chapter on social psychology, a PMB Connections visual highlights the personal experience of cognitive dissonance and then points to research on memory (the dissonant ideas must be stored and associated) and the brain (neural systems involved in memory and emotion must be connected) that bears on the person-level social psychological finding. Most chapters of Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain contain multiple PMB Connections features; readers recurringly see how topics in different parts of the book interconnect.

Each chapter contains enrichment features that expose readers to key topics in psychological science. These features are not “boxed” and thereby segregated from the flow of text, where they may be skipped by readers. Instead, they are integrated into the narrative and placed at points where they deepen readers’ understanding of overall chapter material. Our three enrichment features are Research Toolkit, Cultural Opportunities, and This Just In.

In each subfield of psychology, researchers employ specialized data-collection tools. Personality psychologists, for example, overcome limits of self-report measures via implicit measures of individual differences. Cognitive psychologists map the mental representations used in problem solving through think-aloud verbal protocols. Teaching students about such research tools is part of our educational mission. The question is, “Where should a textbook introduce these methods?”

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Some textbooks compartmentalize research methods, with all discussion of methodology appearing in one early chapter. The drawback is plain to see. Early in the semester, students are unfamiliar with the substantive scientific questions that the methods are designed to answer.

Rather than compartmentalizing methods coverage, Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain distributes it throughout the text. In addition to a foundational research methods chapter (Chapter 2), each subsequent chapter of the text presents a research technique germane to that chapter’s topic. This is done in a Research Toolkit feature. Each Research Toolkit describes a scientific challenge, encourages students to think critically about it, and presents a research tool that provides a solution. The Research Toolkit thus covers methods where they can best be understood: within the context of the substantive psychological questions.

Some textbooks discuss culture in only one section of the book (e.g., within a social psychology chapter). This compartmentalization conflicts with the findings of today’s psychological science. Cultural beliefs and practices shape the developing person, the mind, and the brain—and the body as a whole, as made evident by findings on nature–nurture interactions.

In order to capture these scientific advances, each chapter of Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain contains an enrichment feature called Cultural Opportunities. It showcases findings from the study of psychology and culture that address fundamental questions in psychological science.

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We’re bombarded daily—by journals, scientific organizations, and the popular press—with news of novel findings in psychological science. Many of these are incremental advances that need not be covered in introductory psychology. But some are breakthroughs that fundamentally reshape scientific understanding. We cover these breakthroughs in an enrichment feature called This Just In. Each chapter of the text exposes students to “just in” findings that are cutting-edge yet readily comprehensible.

In addition to providing information about recent findings, This Just In teaches a more general lesson. The introductory student needs to understand not only that psychology is a science, but also that it is a rapidly evolving one. Advances in theory and research—including the invention of novel data-collection methodologies that were entirely unavailable a generation ago—produce new knowledge at a fast pace. There is no better way of teaching this lesson than by exposing students not only to classic research paradigms of the past, but also to the methods and findings that drive today’s science forward.

Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain uniquely integrates the textbook experience with research experience. Readers take part in the methods of psychological science thanks to a feature called Try This!

In each chapter, readers are directed to our Web site, www.pmbpsychology.com, where they are invited to take part in a Try This! research experience. The Web site provides feedback on users’ own results and compares those results with published research findings. After readers return to the text, they learn more about the research experience in their subsequent reading.

Try This! creates a uniquely active textbook experience. Readers learn—not only by reading, but also by “doing”— that psychology is a science built on a firm foundation of research results.

In some textbooks, the pedagogical program is literally an afterthought—an element added after the main text is written. In Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain, the pedagogical program has been integrated into the text from the start by our pedagogical author, Tracy L. Caldwell. Dr. Caldwell’s pedagogy is designed to enhance student engagement, to deepen readers’ understanding of material, and to challenge readers to find out for themselves how much they have learned from the main text.

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The pedagogy is designed around Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, a systematic enumeration of learning objectives developed by the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom and revised subsequently by psychologists and education researchers (Krathwohl, 2002; Munzenmaier & Rubin, 2013). The objectives move far beyond the simple first goal of retaining knowledge of basic facts. As Bloom’s Taxonomy recognizes, course instructors want students to acquire deeper intellectual skills: comprehending material (interpreting its meaning and extrapolating beyond information provided), applying knowledge (e.g., using a concept to solve problems), analyzing information (breaking down complex phenomena into constituent parts), synthesizing material (generating a novel intellectual product by relating ideas to one another), and evaluating concepts and findings (judging their relative worth). These learning objectives—knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation—constitute the six levels of Bloom’s system (which we pursue without assuming that they comprise a strict hierarchy in which, for example, evaluation is necessarily more complex than synthesis).

Readers benefit from a range of pedagogical features that pursue various levels in this set of educational objectives:

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In order to support students’ undergraduate experience in psychology as well as career development, the content in Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain is aligned with The APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major 2.0. These guidelines present a rigorous standard for what students should gain from foundational courses as well as the complete major. A full concordance to the APA guidelines is posted in the Resources area of LaunchPad at www.macmillanhighered.com/launchpad/Cervone1e. The Test Bank is also aligned to these guidelines, and instructors can sort questions by APA learning goal.

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The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) began including test items assessing knowledge of psychology in 2015. One-fourth of the test’s questions pertain to the “Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior,” and the majority of those items address material covered in the typical introductory psychology course. The table below shows how topics covered in Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain correspond to the topics enumerated in the MCAT Preview Guide. A complete listing of the correspondence between MCAT psychology topics and this book’s contents is available for download from the Resources area of LaunchPad at www.macmillanhighered.com/launchpad/Cervone1e.

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I once thought I’d employ the phrase “It takes a village” in this thank-you section of the preface. But “village” now seems too small a population unit. A remarkably large number of people has contributed, directly and indirectly, to this book’s production.

Jenny DeGroot and Nicholas DeGroot Cervone observed years of oddities. Most people don’t bring their work computer on “vacation.” Other parents were not typing rapidly during time-outs at grade school basketball games. Thanks for putting up with all that!

Thanks also to family in Florida for kindly asking, “How is your book going?” at every holiday season. On a much more serious note, during the course of the writing, our family suffered a tragic loss that was attributable to a psychological disorder. Nothing can lessen the pain of such events. But they do motivate the author to craft a textbook that might inspire some readers to enter into and eventually advance this field in a way that may improve treatments for psychological distress (a motivation reflected in this book’s dedication).

Numerous individuals provided information to the author throughout the years of writing. Colleagues at the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago generously shared their knowledge of topics ranging from neurotransmitters to cognitive science to communities and cultures. Friends outside psychology have kept me up-to-date on relevant developments in the world of science and the world at large; in this regard, I particularly thank my professorial pal, Mr. Aninda Roy.

My experience teaching introductory psychology at UIC has greatly benefited the present work. Undergraduates’ moments of comprehension and puzzlement, interest and occasional boredom provided clues as to how best to structure material. Remarkably skilled graduate teaching assistants at UIC frequently shared insights into ways of enhancing undergraduate students’ engagement in, and comprehension of, psychological science.

I’d like also to acknowledge earlier academic experiences that placed me in a position to write this book. The faculty at Oberlin College provided an extraordinarily hands-on, active undergraduate experience. The Department of Psychology at Stanford University, where I earned my PhD, was a veritable Psychology Hall of Fame—except that the hall-of-famers were there, still playing, and still in their prime. It was inspiring.

Four colleagues deserve special thanks. During our years of co-authoring a graduate-level personality psychology textbook, Gian Vittorio Caprara provided me with an educational experience rivaled only by my years in college. Larry Pervin’s invitation to co-author his classic undergraduate personality text presented an opportunity that proved invaluable both personally and professionally. I deeply appreciate the support, throughout the writing of this book, of Walter Mischel, whose call for an integrative science of the person is echoed throughout its pages. Finally, I had the incredible good fortune of working, in graduate school, with Albert Bandura. The essential feature of Bandura’s psychology is a call for psychology to center its attention on the cognitive capabilities that make humans unique and the psychosocial experiences that are the foundation of these capabilities. Had the field paid greater attention to this message when Bandura first sounded it, a person-first intro psych textbook would not be such a novelty today.

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Throughout the preparation of this book, we benefited from the insights of a large team of chapter reviewers and focus group attendees.

Carol Lynn Anderson
Bellevue College

Jessyca Arthur-Cameselle
Manhattanville College

Josh Avera
De Anza College

Jeffrey Baker
Monroe Community College

Cynthia Barkley
California State University, East Bay

Dave Baskind
Delta College

Rinad Beidas
Temple University

Danny Benbassat
George Washington University

Joseph Benz
University of Nebraska at Kearney

Garrett Berman
Roger Williams University

Matthew Blankenship
Western Illinois University

John Broida
University of Southern Maine

Michelle Renae Byrd
Eastern Michigan University

Jessica Cail
Pepperdine University

Kevin M. Chun
University of San Francisco

Sheree Conrad
University of Massachusetts

Kristi Cordell-McNulty
Angelo State University

Ginean Crawford
Rowan University

Deanna DeGidio
Cuyahoga Community College Eastern Campus

Christopher Dehon
Monroe Community College

Daneen Deptula
Fitchburg State University

Nick Dominello
Penn State University

Dale Doty
Monroe Community College

Curtis Dunkel
Western Illinois University

Frederick Elias
California State University, Northridge

Renee Engeln
Northwestern University

Staussa C. Ervin
Tarrant County College, South

Todd Farris
Los Angeles Valley College

Dan Fawaz
Georgia Perimeter College

Diane Feibel
University of Cincinnati—Blue Ash College

Adam Fingerhut
Loyola Marymount University

Donna Fisher Thompson
Niagara University

Claire Ford
Bridgewater State University

Alan Fridlund
University of California, Santa Barbara

Erica Gannon
Clayton State University

Marilyn Gibbons-Arhelger
Southwest Texas State University

Bryan Gibson
Central Michigan University

Jennifer Gibson
Tarleton State University

Jamie Lynn Goldenberg
University of South Florida

Jennifer Gonder
Farmingdale State College, SUNY

Chris Goode
Georgia State University

Wind Goodfriend
Buena Vista University

Jeffrey Goodman
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

Cameron L. Gordon
University of North Carolina Wilmington

Ray Gordon
Bristol Community College

Jonathan Gore
Eastern Kentucky University

Raymond J. Green
Texas A&M University-Commerce

LaShonda Greene-Burley
La Salle University

Sheila Greenlee
Christopher Newport University

Robert Guttentag
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Shawn Haake
Iowa Central Community College

Meara Habashi
University of Iowa

Justin David Hackett
University of Houston-Downtown

Sowon Hahn
University of Oklahoma

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Carrie Hall
Miami University (OH)

Deletha Hardin
The University of Tampa

Christian L. Hart
Texas Woman’s University

Mark Hauber
Hunter College

Erin Henshaw
Eastern Michigan University

Julie Hernandez
Rock Valley College

Sachi Horback
Bucks County Community College

Allen Huffcutt
Bradley University

Charles Huffman
James Madison University

Jack Kahn
Curry College

Donald Kates
College of DuPage

Julie Kiotas
Pasadena City College

Laura Kirsch
Curry College

Laura Knight
Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Tim Koeltzow
Bradley University

Gordon D. Lamb
Sam Houston State University

Mark Laumakis
San Diego State University

Natalie Lawrence
James Madison University

Marlene Leeper
Tarrant County College, Northeast

Kenneth J. Leising
Texas Christian University

Fabio Leite
The Ohio State University at Lima

Barbara Lewis
Susquehanna University

Christine Lofgren
University of California, Irvine

Nicolette Lopez
University of Texas at Arlington

Ben Lovett
Elmira College

Martha Low
Winston-Salem State University

Pamela Ludemann
Framingham State University

Margaret Lynch
San Francisco State University

Amy Lyndon
East Carolina University

Jason Lyons
Tarleton State University

Lynda Mae
Arizona State University

Thomas Malloy
Rhode Island College

Michael Mangan
University of New Hampshire

Karen Marsh
University of Minnesota Duluth

Man’Dee Kameron Mason
Tarleton State University

Dawn McBride
Illinois State University

Todd J. McCallum
Case Western Reserve University

Yvonne McCoy
Tarrant County College, Northeast

Ticily Medley
Tarrant County College, South

Ronald Mehiel
Shippensburg University

Diana Milillo
Nassau Community College

Dan Miller
Indiana University—Purdue University Fort Wayne

Dennis Miller
University of Missouri

Robin Morgan
Indiana University Southeast

Laura Naumann
Sonoma State University

Bryan Neighbors
Southwestern University

Todd Nelson
California State University, Stanislaus

Glenda G. Nichols
Tarrant County College, South

Arthur Olguin
Santa Barbara City College

Lynn Olzak
Miami University (OH)

Charles Thomas Overstreet, Jr.
Tarrant County College, South

John Pierce
Villanova University

Thomas G. Plante
Santa Clara University

Laura Ramsey
Bridgewater State University

Heather J. Rice
Washington University in St. Louis

Vicki Ritts
St. Louis Community College, Meramec

Ronald Ruiz
Riverside City College

Shannon Rich Scott
Texas Woman’s University

Sandra Sego
American International College

Gregory Shelley
Kutztown University

Teow-Chong Sim
Sam Houston State University

Jesse Tauriac
Lasell College

Paul Thibodeau
Oberlin College

Felicia Thomas
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Donna Thompson
Midland College

Michelle Tomaszycki
Wayne State University

Jan Tornick
University of New Hampshire

Jose Velarde
Tarrant County College, Southeast

Jeffrey Wagman
Illinois State University

Nancy Woehrle
Wittenberg University

Brandy Young
Cypress College

Ryan Zayac
University of North Alabama

Zane Zheng
Lasell College

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A huge thank-you to all of you; your efforts greatly strengthened the final product. Thanks also to Glenn and Meg Turner, Cathy Crow, and Brad Rivenburgh of Burrston House, who organized and synthesized the extensive review processes.

A remarkable team of professionals at Worth Publishers is responsible for this book’s production. The energy and creativity of Senior Acquisitions Editor Dan DeBonis were crucial in bringing the project to fruition. Worth Publisher Rachel Losh, Assistant Editor Nadina Persaud, Editorial Assistant Katie Pachnos, and Managing Editor Lisa Kinne provided additional key support. The production process has also benefited from the work of Worth’s Director of Editing, Design, and Media Production for the Sciences and Social Sciences, Tracey Kuehn; Executive Media Editor, Rachel Comerford; and Production Manager, Sarah Segal. Preparation of the manuscript was speeded by the reference-list-creation wizardry of UIC’s Lara Mercurio. The tireless efforts of Photo Editor Bianca Moscatelli and Photo Researchers Elyse Rieder and Rona Tuccillo contributed substantially to the book’s visual appearance, as did the work of Art Director Diana Blume and Art Manager Matthew McAdams. We had the great good fortune of having, as our Interior and Cover Designer, the brilliant artist Babs Reingold. Special thanks to Senior Production Editor Vivien Weiss for somehow piecing together the project’s many parts.

The writing has benefited from the skills of two exceptional Developmental Editors. Mimi Melek provided critical instructive feedback throughout the book’s early development. The subsequent contributions of Cathy Crow were so extensive, so constructive, and executed so efficiently that I cannot help but wonder if, in reality, a team of professionals was working under the pen name “Cathy Crow.”

Finally, thanks to two Worth professionals without whom we would not be here. Catherine Woods’s confidence in the project at its outset is deeply appreciated. Once under way, the work was nurtured for years by the wisdom and warmth of Kevin Feyen, who contributed immeasurably to the final product.

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Although the main text of this book is sole-authored, Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain has been a collaboration from start to finish. The project would never have come into being were it not for the intellectual insights of my infinitely valued colleague, Dr. Tracy L. Caldwell of Dominican University. The student quoted at the start of this preface was a student of Tracy’s. Her recognition that this student’s—and all students’—experiences in introductory psychology could be fundamentally improved sparked the conversation (and subsequent flurry of emails) that established the person-first, levels-of-analysis framework executed here.

These communications occurred shortly before Dr. Caldwell joined the faculty at Dominican. Because the assistant-professor years are not the time to write a textbook, I took on the authorship role. Yet Dr. Caldwell’s input is felt on every page. She authored the book’s pedagogical features: Preview Questions, Chapter Summaries and Answers (Appendix B), In Your Life questions, What Do You Know? assessments, Questions for Discussion, and end-of-chapter Self-Tests. Tracy crafted, with me, a key media piece: the Try This! activities. She independently authored a major instructional item: the Statistics appendix (Appendix A). Yet this list, extensive as it is, substantially underestimates Dr. Caldwell’s actual impact. All throughout the many years of writing, she was central to the discussions in which the book’s features were formulated and refined. This project not only began with a conversation; it also continued as one. We have always thought of this as “our book,” and you should, too.

We jointly thank Worth Publishers for their incredible professionalism and support.

University of Illinois at Chicago

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